


over valley hill and plain

by MathildaHilda



Series: What If; Red Dead Redemption Edition [3]
Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, RDR1 canon is still in affect/effect and i don't know how to spell, Reunions but not very happy ones, TB Sucks with a capital S, What If - Arthur lives, rdr1 has happened and Arthur's alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-04-05 04:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19041163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: John Marston has made his final stand.A man steps off a stagecoach in Blackwater come in from the South.





	1. 1911

**Author's Note:**

> Title from; 'The Old Scout's Lament'

“Rise and shine, mister!”

The sun of West Elizabeth is scorching at best, and a God send amongst other things. He steps off the couch, accepts the bag handed to him by the worker of the local coach company, and looks around for a moment.

It’s different, not too much however, but enough to start allowing his memory to doubt itself as he looks around.

The bank is in the final stages of some sort of final repair or other, and there’s still a waft of tangent and rotten seaweed of some kind from the harbor, now a big, bustling environment, quite different from what it had once been.

He hasn’t visited the area in twelve years, but it still feels like he was there only a few days ago.

He smiles politely when greeted, tips his hat to the gents, and pushes his way to the saloon. He pushes his handkerchief, an old and battered but clean thing, to his mouth when he coughs once against the dry air his lungs have missed desperately since his departure from Mexico, given that he had to take a detour that delayed him with at least a few days.

It doesn’t come away red, and he tucks it back into his pocket, somewhat satisfied, and leans against the counter and asks for a room. He gets the last one, knowing full well even now that the hotel is no doubt full considering the time he’s decided to go back.

He writes his name, an old habit and a newer name, and lugs his bag up the stairs around the back. He’s barely tossed the bag on the bed when he hears the unmistakable sound of someone discussing, rather loudly, someone he had long hoped to be able to see again.

The matter discussed, however, sends his stomach plummeting into the ground.

“It’s an awful affair, the whole thing.” A woman says, no doubt waving a fan about her face as she speaks, and with sky-high plumes on her head. “They seemed like such nice folks, the lot of them.”

“You speakin’ of the Marstons’?” A man replies, a cigar or other muffling his words somewhat. “Yes,” the woman replied, sounding as if the man had just said something incredibly stupid.

“I am. You’ve heard about it, I hope?” She snaps. “Sure have.” He replies, words still muffled behind something big stuffed in his mouth.

“I don’t know who to believe.” The woman says again, seeming to contemplate the meaning of rumors she’d no doubt heard at some women’s club in town.

“That Mister Marston would willingly sell out those old friends of his; he always was such a darlin’ soul, or that those agents that’ve been riding up and down the streets the last few weeks have been forcing his hand. What do you think?” She asks her companion, who hums a reply that he can’t hear because he’s out the door with a bang that deafens whatever reply he would have said, had he not been so rudely cut off.

“Where do they live? These Marstons´?” He snaps rather than asks, the rattle in his lungs just waiting to make an appearance. The woman glares at him, and the man has dropped the cigar. The woman does points eastward, however, away from them and back into the plains from which he came.

“You can hardly miss them. It’s the only ranch until you end up by the MacFarlanes’, and that is still quite a ways to go.”

He has turned on his heel to leave when the man raises his voice, looking more at his snapped cigar than at him. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up, if you knew ‘em. Last we heard; old Mister Marston’s got himself shot to Hell by them agents from the North.”

If his stomach could drop even more, the innkeeper would’ve had a hole in the floor beneath his own two feet.

 

***

 

He almost has the urge to steal a horse, but that wouldn’t exactly do anyone any good, so he loans a gelding from the stable and takes off faster than he’s ridden since Buell fell under him all those years ago.

He meets a sheep on the road, its wool a thick red color from all the sand of the plains, and it takes one look at him and darts the other way. He follows it without meaning to, and finds the place, just like the woman said, perched behind a small hill.

(It doesn’t escape his eyes, that there are three crosses driven into the ground under the big tree.)

 

The sheep runs through a hole in the fence, and he allows his horse to follow, trotting over rocky and patchy ground until he reaches the house.

It’s a big structure, no doubt a real farmhouse built on precut wood, and the barn looks about as sturdy. A flock of sheep graze on what little is alive in the scorching heat, and a bull is angrily kicking at a water trough by the barn’s side.

He’s almost reached the house, when the door is opened and a woman steps out in her nightgown and evening coat, brandishing an impressively ornate shotgun.

“Get the Hell of my property before I blow your Goddamn head off.” She snaps, Devil incarnate, and cocks it just for the sake of it.

He knows her before he hears her speak, and he would’ve smiled, had he met her again under different circumstances.

“You always had that fine way with words, Abigail Roberts.” He says and lowers himself from his saddle. He doesn’t own a gun apart from the one tucked into the folds of his coat, but he’d never bet on himself in a firefight with Abigail Marston.

She squints at him against the evening sun shining its rays and creating its own shadows in the trees and the house. Her grip doesn’t falter on the gun, and she waves it a small bit once he takes a step closer. The horse kicks the ground, nervous of the stand-off no doubt, and he holds up a hand in both directions.

Both to calm the horse, and calm the grieving woman on the porch.

“Ma?” Comes an adolescent voice from inside the house, but Abigail hasn’t moved or said anything since he took that one step forward.

She shakes her head now, though, when he takes off his hat.

“No.” She says, and he knows how it must look.

Your husband’s dead and buried, because he went after his past actions, and here stands, just a few days later, yet another past action, long since thought having been dead and buried himself.

Their eyes meet, and for a split moment he’s prepared for her to actually fire the gun.

Instead, Abigail Marston -- among the strongest women he’s ever had the luck of meeting -- bursts into tears, places the gun against the bannister of the porch, and meets him halfway.

She cries into the crook of his neck, and he holds her there. She’s thin and wiry, every bit of her proof of one life on the run and another on the plains or West Elizabeth, and she’s shaking like a leaf in his arms.

“Ma, what’s-,” a kid, looking every bit like the kid he’d seen rescued on the gallows of Illinois all those years ago, steps out the door with his own hand on a revolver.

He thinks, for one small moment, that the only reason he holds the gun is because his mother can only protect them with one gun at a time. There would exist few other reasons why Abigail Marston would allow her son to carry a gun, seeing how against it she seemed all those years ago in camp.

“Who’s this?” The boy asks, and Goddamn he even sounds like his father, and eyes the tearful reunion with an understandable manner of suspicion. His question makes Abigail lean back, look at him good and proper, and stutter a reply through chapped lips and clenched teeth.

“This’s your Uncle Arthur, Jack.” And Jack all but drops the gun, fumbles with it last minute, and levels it onto a chair when his mother turns back around.

“Uncle Arthur’s dead.” Jack says, his voice rising a pitch in both boyhood and the grief he’s been settled with for the last few days.

“Sure, he is. He just has a different name now’s all.” Arthur replies, gripping Abigail loosely around the arms. “‘m sorry I wasn’t here, Abigail.”

She shakes her head at that, allows him a semblance of his own sorrow reflecting in her stubbornness. “You’d’ve been dead then, too.” She whispers, and he can see so very clearly that she hasn’t slept a wink since all that terrible business happened.

“I read about some of it.” He says and leads her toward the porch, where he lets her sink down on the chair not occupied by Jack’s gun. “Was close to some of it.” He says and sinks to a crouch in front of her, her hands trapped in his in her lap.

“You were?” Jack asks, moved to the side of their little trapped embrace of such. The gun’s gone from the chair, but he’s not holding it either.

Arthur doubts he looks anything like he did from the few fleeting memories of Jack’s young past, his hair having gone just a little gray and his frame so much leaner that he’d most likely resemble a coyote rather than a bear, had Dutch been asked to make the comparison again.

(Hadn’t been his question asked, but somehow Dutch seemed fit to describe his boys’ after what they resembled, rather than for what they was.

Had you asked Arthur, now all those years later, he’d’ve described them all as rabid wolves.)

 

His eyes are still bright, if a little dulled from the sickness that ain’t never going away completely, and his skin is still a little pale, even after all the Mexican sun he’d taken in over the years.

“Stayed at a convent, few miles away from where that whole mess went down.” He doesn’t tell them of the men that came scrambling for cover, only to be gunned down by a militia no one really cared about. The militia hadn’t bothered with the convent, already seeming to know that there was no value whatsoever in the trinkets it held, and had simply been on their way as soon as they’d deposited the bodies further aways for the vultures to feast.

Abigail locks her eyes with his, and Arthur wishes so Goddamn much that he could take all of that away from her. All that grief and all that pain, because God knows he’s felt it all before. Not at the same magnitude, but it was pretty damn close.

“That’s where you’ve been all these years?” She whispers so quietly, and all he can do is nod. “Was offered the first, best ride outta here to see if maybe I could beat this a little. I came back to see what’d happened since I’d left.”

“I didn’t know about this.” He says and waves one hand about the space that is the Marstons’ home.

Abigail smiles then, tight lipped and sweet, and wipes strands of her black hair from her face, and announces that ‘ _maybe it’s time for supper’._

Supper does sound nice, but she does catch the way his eyes go.

“He’d want to see you again.” Is all she says before pulling the boy with her through the front door.

Arthur Morgan, deceased since 1899, stares up at that hill until his horse skitters because of another kick from the bull by his trough, and Arthur Callahan, created in some lawbook in 1900, makes the climb up the steep and rocky hill.

Blackwater had spoken about Mister Marston’s demise to government agents, but no one had spoken about the old and drunk fool who had fallen beside him.

The desert roses doesn’t grow that close to the ranch or the graves, so he picks up two rocks, adequate in size, and places them on each grave; both in greeting, and goodbye.


	2. 1914

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arthur looks at Jack, and for a moment, all he sees is John.

Jack sits by Abigail’s side, in the days before her end, while Arthur trudges through the rain of West Elisabeth in an attempt to keep everything busy and fed, should Abigail defy Death and wobble out to the porch and demand that he do it right.

Even a fever can turn the head on so many people, and even the kindest of women Arthur’s ever met, could be found shouting obscenities where none were required.

 

(She had called him John some few times, when he’d stood far away and halfway out of sight, and had sobbed against the railing of the porch when she remembered that John weren’t there anymore.)

 

Arthur’s overseeing the birth of a bull when the barndoor opens and Jack Marston made his way into the barn, eyes to the ground and hands idle in his pockets.

He’s not looking up, for fear of spooking the cow, which is Arthur’s first impression of the boy. His second impression, was the lack of emotion on the boy’s face.

He barely has time to open his mouth and ask, before the boy opens his own and spits out the words, as if though they carry the plague itself.

And, perhaps, they do.

“She slept.” Is all he says, and braces his hands against the stall in which Arthur stands.

“She slept. And, I came in with some stew, and she wouldn’t wake up.”

Arthur hasn’t felt as cold as that since he’d found his way to Beecher’s Hope, years before, and learnt the truths and fates of brothers and friends.

Jack hasn’t ever been one for contact in any shape or form, it’d seemed, apart from when he was young and had little choice when his mother wrapped him in a hug. Arthur hasn’t ever been one for such himself, but he pushes the stall open all the same, and grabs Jack by the shoulders.

The boy quivers in his hold, and grips fists of Arthur’s vest and shirt, and holds on for the longest time.

 

~

 

By the time they called for the undertaker and the Reverend, Jack is already finished digging the grave.

Arthur, with a relapse in the Tuberculosis as thanks to the damn rain, rode into town, and collected what was needed, and then rode back in just the same time and fashion, since disrupting those damaged lungs of his would do no one any good.

 

(If he did, then Jack might have to dig another grave.)

 

He arrives, just in time to see Jack staring at his mother’s dresses, laid out nicely on his bed where he’s pulled them from his mother’s chests.

Black, and red, and blue dresses, and even one in a suspicious moss green color – no doubt a gift from John if the color-scheme was anything to go by – but the boy seems to only have eyes for the navy-blue dress with white around the ruffles and around the cuffs.

The undertakers does most of the job; dons her in the blue dress, braids her hair just right and paints her cheeks so full of powder so that she looks more like a ghost than any dead person Arthur’s ever seen.

They close her eyes with beeswax, and it’s a small enough amount so that one can hardly tell from beneath the powder. Arthur, and Jack, can tell once the undertakers offers them one last look, but it’s enough so that no one else can see much of it.

 

(“They buried Pa with his eyes open.” Jack says, two days before he leaves.

It catches him off guard enough so that he doesn’t say anything, but, then again, he hasn’t had much of anything to say in the last few years.

Some lonely part of Arthur, wishes that whosoever buries him, lets him sleep with open eyes, so that he can watch the sun rise once again, just as he was supposed to all those years previous.

He also wishes to be buried just so, so that he can stare John square in the face, once whatever exists, allows them to visit one another again, and give him that usual lecture of familial pride.)

 

But, despite everything, Abigail Marston is beautiful, even in death.

 

~

 

“It ain’t gonna bring no one back, Jack.” Arthur says, arms crossed, and body leaned against the same stall where Jack had gone to him, once Abigail’d gone.

“Maybe it ain’t.” Jack mumbles back, not bothering to look up from where he stuffs a blanket into a saddlebag. The bag goes bulky from the odd pressure inside, and Arthur briefly wonders if it’ll break at the seams if he keeps packing the way that he does.

“So, then why do it? It ain’t what either your Ma or your Pa would’ve wanted.”

Now, Jack does pause, eyes still glued to the bag. He disassembles what he’s packed together, emptying the pack on the ground and rolling extra cans of provision and a pair of bulky socks his mother knitted him once, into the blanket. It fits better, but that still doesn’t explain the foolishness of what he’s about to do.

“I owe them.”

It’s barely above a whisper, and even then, Arthur’s not too sure of what exactly it is he just heard.

“You don’t owe too many people a damn thing, Jack. You especially don’t owe anyone anything when it comes to Ross.”

Jack does turn to him now, his eyes something he, without a doubt, inherited from his father, seeing just how dark they become when angry. Jack turns to him, fists clenched tight, but Arthur still doesn’t move.

He simply stares, meets the hurt boy’s eyes, and avoids words. He’s had staring matches such as these with John, too many times before, when the younger man had lost a brawl or a score or something as simple as an arm-wrestling match, and had vowed revenge over dumb things.

“Revenge is-,”

“A fool’s game. Yeah, I know.” Jack snaps.

“So, then why take him up on it?”

Jack goes quiet at that, and walks over to the horse, and adjusts the bridle just to keep from looking at Arthur.

“A fever ain’t exactly Edgar Ross’ fault, Jack.”

“No,” he says after another beat of silence. “It ain’t. But, it is his fault that Pa ain’t here.”

Arthur opens his mouth to speak, but the kid beats him to it.

“It’s his fault that you had to come find us, and weren’t with us to begin with. It’s his fault Uncle Dutch is dead, and that Uncle Hosea had to die as well. It’s his fault we ain’t with the others, because they’re now either dead, gone or both, and we seem to be the only ones left around here. This whole thing, is his Goddamn fault.” There’s an arm waves around the space around them, and out the ajar barndoor, where the ground is still coated in invisible, red ink.

Arthur doesn’t say, that maybe it’s not inherently the fault of one man, and he also doesn’t say that in that moment, he sounds an awful lot like Dutch.

“I ain’t doin’ this for momma, or for some stupid pride. I’m doin’ this for Pa, and Uncle, and Sadie, and Charles and everyone who used to run with us. Even Bill, and Javier. Even Goddamn Micah.” Jack whispers the last of the words, and it’s a train to the gut, but Arthur bites his tongue, nonetheless.

“I’m doin’ this for you, Uncle Arthur.”

Jack finishes cinching the saddle, and lugs the saddlebag over and tosses it over the horse’s rump, fastening it before Arthur even has the time to find his words.

“And, if I ask you not to do this? You said you’re doin’ it for me, just as much as for your Pa, so what if I asked you not to?”

“Pa didn’t know you was alive, when he went after Micah. Didn’t know, or didn’t care, or maybe both, and momma begged him not to go, but he went anyway-,”

“And, look what that caused, Jack. John went after Micah, Micah ended up in them papers, and the damned law no doubt found their way here, simply because of your Pa’s wish for revenge.”

Arthur looks at Jack, and for a moment, all he sees is John.

Young, scared, unscarred John Marston, with a bigger mouth than brain and with an undying thirst for the revenge life no doubt beat out of him until Micah Bell climbed through a hole in their well-structured fence and wished for another chance at life on the run.

When Arthur looks at Jack, in the hours before he leaves despite Arthur’s protests and arguments against it, he looks so much like John at that same age; nineteen, and hurting and so without wish for pride or honor.

John Marston, just like his son, had ever done very little in the name of pride.

**Author's Note:**

> I might write a second chapter to this, following this trio around 1914 after the main setting of the first game!
> 
> Sound off a comment if that would be of interest and I'd love to hear what you thought about the story so far, I'd be very happy to hear your opinions!
> 
> You can find my [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) here!


End file.
